This content discusses the importance of strategic design in connecting aspirations with actions and outcomes. It emphasizes that strategy isn’t confined to boardrooms but occurs in everyday decisions. Key components include inquiry, visioning, planning, implementation, and evaluation, all of which work together to create an impactful, adaptive strategy.
The Practice of Strategy Read More »
Strategy is the means of connecting our aspirations and resources to our actions and outcomes. Strategy is something we design with our organization’s goals, values, assets, people, and customers/clients/patients/partners in mind. Strategic design is the means and positive impact is the end. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be walking through the art and science of
Fall Into Strategy: The Practice of Making Strategy Real Read More »
Caring is essential for effective leadership, enabling connection and engagement within organizations. It involves attentive listening and intentional actions that foster psychological safety and trust. By prioritizing relational leadership and supportive organizational systems, leaders can motivate teams, manage complexity, and drive innovation, making care integral to their strategic vision and organizational success.
As human systems grow increasingly complex, the need for learning and adaptation intensifies. Design-driven evaluation (DDE) merges design thinking with evaluation to enhance accountability and impact. By embedding evaluation within programs and prioritizing user feedback, DDE fosters continuous learning, enabling organizations to effectively navigate change and drive sustainable innovation.
Design-Driven Evaluation and Strategic Design Read More »
In this latest in the series on strategic design and complexity, we cast our gaze to the future and the role of foresight in contributing to strategic design. Strategic design involves developing a vision for what you want to become and where you wish to go as an organization, and then shaping a course of
Strategic Foresight and Design Read More »
In this latest in our series on strategic design in complex times, we look at the ways in which design methods, tools, and thinking can shape systems and channel our intentions. This is strategic design. For more information, check out the earlier posts on complexity, strategy and introductions to strategic design. The aim is to
Strategic Design: Bridging Complexity, Planning, & Evaluation for Impact Read More »
Leadership in complexity comes down to three words that, if lived by, can transform organziations and navigate uncertainty with grace. These are: humilty, inquiry and agility. Strategy involves leadership. Knowing what to do when there is uncertainty is among the great challenges that complexity poses. There aren’t ‘best practices’ that enable tried and true results,
Leadership for Complexity: Humility, Inquiry, and Agility Read More »
Strategy isn’t just about planning—it’s about preparing to meet the future, to shape it, and not just react to what comes our way. In conditions of complexity, the organizations that invest in thinking clearly are the ones that perform better, adapt faster, and lead with confidence. Why engage in strategy making? Just as a sailor
Strategy for Leadership By Design: A Brief Introduction Read More »
In the previous post, we looked at what complexity is and left with a metaphor of sailing to describe the ways in which we can understand complexity. In this post, we look at how to navigate complexity and ask: what does that mean for what we do and how we do it? Complexity is a
Navigating Complexity: Using Strategic Design Read More »
There is an entire field of practice loosely referred to as “systems change” that guides how to effect substantive social, environmental, and political changes in our world. The methods and tools are varied, and the means of evaluating system change are numerous. Still, the general thrust of these approaches is designed to unlock social innovation,
From Systems Change to Transformation Read More »
